Book Description
“Iconic brands” (ie: Coca-Cola, Volkswagon, Corona) have social lives and cultural significance that go well beyond product benefits and features
This book distills the strategies used to create the world’s most enduring brands into a new approach called “cultural branding".
Brand identity is more critical than ever today, as more and more products compete for attention across an ever-increasing array of channels. This book offers marketers and managers an alternative to conventional branding strategies, which often backfire when companies attempt to create identity brands.
Customer Reviews:
Dissapointment.......2006-02-02
I am very surprised with the rave reviews of this book here. I decided to purchase it for two reasons. First, I trusted the reviews here and decided it would be important to own this book. Second, I am familiar with Douglas Holt's academic work, and have read his articles in academic journals. I thought this book will be very interesting to read.
I am dissapointed mainly because I find that the book does not tell me something original. Instead what Douglas Holt keeps saying in this book is that building an iconic brand is possible by focusing on culture not products. His argument is not convincing, especially when he tries to disprove other forms of brand building: tradition, cultural and emotional. If I have a brand new product, can I still build an icon? Is it advantageous to have an iconic brand? What are the downside of it? These are not talked about in the book.
Another problem is that he keeps repeating the same argument again and again. It gets very boring after a few pages only.
What a disappointment!
Surprisingly Important Book.......2005-11-08
I'm no business-head. I find modern consumerism more disturbing than exciting. But I read this book as part of a study on public relations and I must say Holt's passion for the subject is contagious.
First of all, his writing style is superb. He alternates nicely between anecdotes, charts and philosophy, allowing all sorts of minds to grasp just what he's saying. His ideas were bold and insightful, and he helped me to understand what a craft marketing really is.
I sometimes felt his connections were just that - his connections - but a lot of his ideas rang true, and for the most part his evidence was well, evident.
What I found most impressive was his aknowledgement of all the sexism in marketing. Perhaps it's a bit of sexism on my part, but I hadn't expected a man to pick up on all the overt and covert misogyny inherent in the advertising world. Holt not only saw it, he understood how it connected with the greater social and political environment surrounding it.
How Brands Become Icons should be required reading for every high school student in the country. And that's the first time I've said that. Holt's grasp of the subject goes beyond branding, into the heart of American culture, into the minds of the American people. This is not just a how-to book. It's an important book of why.
Great - even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition than by design........2005-08-17
This is an excellent book! Douglas B. Holt gives a cultural perspective to branding which is not that trivial to all managers. The book also presents historical analyses on brands like Mountain Dew, Corona, Volkswagen, and many others. The clear message is that iconic brands can't be created through conventional branding strategies, instead there is a need for a cultural perspectice to branding.
Make your brand an icon.......2005-04-14
Informative and entertaining, this book is a combination of cult references and great ideas. A solid guide to making your brand more succesful,Douglas provides the background knowledge you do the rest.
Planning to be an Icon, not Hoping it will Happen.......2004-11-19
A few, a very few products make it to icon status: Coke, Volkswagen and Harley-Davidson to name a few. And these have come about more by chance than by planning. In their time the marketing managers of these companies were just trying to establish next quarters sales.
This is one of the first books I've seen that approaches branding from a view of this kind of permanence, this kind of cultural approach. Most clear is the message that following trends can never build an iconic brand.
I'm not so sure that todays management, focused on this quarter, and maybe next is really ready for thinking about forming a brand that will endure for generations. Yet you do see companies with the kind of foresight to do just that. When Microsoft went into Russia, they went in with the view to establish their brand as the defacto standard. The immediate profits were basically ignored, but next year, and the year after that....
This is a book that has to get above the marketing manager, the CEO needs to provide the direction to say that we want to be the next Klenex.
Book Description
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
Customer Reviews:
Outstanding.......2007-09-03
In lucid, incisive and engaging prose, Fred Turner tells the fascinating story of how innovative modes of working and thinking (born from the World War II military industrial complex) cross-pollinated with hippie counterculture (through the imagination and particular cultural anxieties of Stewart Brand) to produce the current ubiquitous mode of conceiving a world-wide networked reality.
The book isn't a hatchet job of Stewart Brand; but neither is it a celebration of him and his mythology.
It is a sharply-observed, consistently critical look at the ways in which Stewart Brand and his (almost overwhelmingly white, male and privileged) cohort built a particularly powerful ideology, narrative and network around themselves, with very real physical, political, environmental, industrial and ideological consequences.
Damn interesting, and a pleasurable read--Turner's sense of humor and irony are employed subtly but to very enjoyable effect.
An Important book about a major influence of the 60's through the 90's.......2007-05-22
As someone who was deeply and profoundly influenced by the WEC, WER, and the WELL, I found this to both reinvigorate the excitement of the different eras it discusses and, also, to tie them together and provide fresh insights. After I finished it I looked around my office and realized how much of my thinking was influenced by Steward Brand and his experiments. Easily 30% of the books in my library were originally recommended in either the Catalog or the Review. I was also an early WELL subscriber and a `Maniacal' Whole Earth Review subscriber so almost everything mentioned here I could relate to.
It may devolve into `professor-speak' at times but it is well worth it. If you want to know about one of the critical components of both the `counter culture' of the 60's and the internet revolution of the 90's this is a must read.
Interesting but too academic.......2007-05-21
Interesting people and times are covered in this book. The hippie counterculture, Whole Earth Catalog, computer bulletin boards morphing into The Internet, Wired magazine, etc. A good deal of information you probably didn't know, so it may give you a slightly different perspective of this time. Why did these early computer geeks think computers would change society and give power to all the people?
The down side is that it sometimes reads as if it was written by a college professor; but it was! To much theoretical framework for my taste. Still, if you are interested in this time, read the book. You can easily skip the tedious stuff.
An excellent record of an amazing life.......2006-11-26
Stewart Brand is a high-IQ Zelig, who has been a catalyst of so many important developments throughout the last 4 decades of the 20th century. This volume is more scholarly, and more revealing of the social forces at work, than Markoff's What the Dormouse Said. It focuses with great intensity on Brand, due to Turner's unique access to Brand's diaries in the Stanford Library. SB is shown to have been central to far more moments of incipient Renaissance than anyone since Lou Salome, friend of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud: He joined Ken Kesey as an original Prankster, was the videographer for Engelbart's 'mother of all demos,' then linked up all kinds of communes (including Ant Farm) while founding and editing the Whole Earth Catalog. Besides all the events already mentioned, Turner dives deeply into the WELL, which was the primordial "virtual community", co-founded by Brand. With his vision of power as drawn from network affiliations, Brand then built a consulting company called the Global Business Network, which used scenario planning as a form of "corporate performance art", by fusing countercultural norms with the needs of corporate board rooms. Turner does a fairly good job posing critical questions about how the privileged white male perspective defined the unfolding story. He flags the problem of this privilege, but isn't able to concretely identify how it could have been solved. Read this book to learn how SB helped create the world we live in, and deployed his unique social entrepreneurial skills to stay in the center of the game.
What one person can turn on within these vast systems within which we vibrate .......2006-10-26
Like one of his teachers and friends Buckminster Fuller, Stesart Brand is an archetypal example of the American individualist- inventor the man who Thoreau said ' hears the sound of his own drummer'. Paradoxically the super- individualist Brand is also perhaps the single person most responsible for making ordinary Americans connect with, show concern with the various systems cyber-systems, eco-systems, communications - systems we are moving within.
In this informed, detailed, and extremely well- written survey of the career of Brand, Fred Turner also provides a insightful and exciting look at America 's cultural, and especially 'alternative culture ' development from the sixties through the nineties. Brand meets up on his travels with 'Edge's' John Brockman, with Ken Kesey with whom he is a Merry Prankster, with Bucky Fuller who tries to help his projects,with Kevin Kelly of the 'Wired' world, with many of those seeking new ways of making the Technology connect with communal frameworks that will enable ( at least this is one of Brand's goals) the individual to truly be an individual .
Brand's most famous contribution 'The Whole Earth Catalogue' which was certainly one of the major cultural influences upon the Environmental Movement, and incidentally the Hippy Culture of the Sixties , told us the way we could get anything we needed to make our way into the rapidly changing future. Brand's work as editor and thinker also contributed to the World Wide Web to come, and the name and concept 'personal computer' is also one of his contributions.
This is an important work to read not only to learn about decisive moments in the life of a remarkable individual, but to better understand the world- in- the -making we are a part of.
Book Description
An incisive exposŽ of the underhanded advertising initiatives that target teens-and an exploration of their disturbing consequences.
Generation Y has grown up in an age of the brand, bombarded by name products. In Branded, Alissa Quart illuminates the unsettling new reality of marketing to teenagers, as well as the quieter but no less worrisome forms of teen branding: the teen consultants who work for corporations in exchange for product; the girls obsessed with cosmetic surgery who will do anything to look like women on TV; and those teens simply obsessed with admission into a name-brand college. We also meet the pockets of kids attempting to turn the tables on the cocksure corporations that so cynically strive to manipulate them. Chilling, thought-provoking, even darkly amusing, Branded brings one of the most disturbing and least talked about results of contemporary business and culture to the fore-and ensures that we will never look at today's youth the same way again.
Customer Reviews:
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.......2006-07-22
The premise of this book seemed very appealing to me. I have always been very opinionated about "Branding" teenagers, and while in high school I refused to wear well known brand-name clothes.
However, once I got into actually reading the book, I was very dissapointed. Quart seemed, at least to me, to merely skim the surface of the problem, filling the pages with statistics and endless lists of numbers but not really pulling much meaning out of any of it.
It also seemed to me that she focused most of her attention on the "rich" kids. I feel that a comparison between priviledged and average teenagers, even severely underpriviledged teens, would have made the book much more interesting. It got especially frustration for me when I reached the chapter titled "Logo U" because (my being fresh out of highschool) I felt that she was exaggerating, or else obviously not expanding her interviews for children NOT from wealthy families. I never took an SAT course, never bought an expensive SAT book but still did perfectly well on my SATs, and got into several excellent colleges.
I understand that the point she was trying to make was about teens getting the "Logo U"s in their minds and refusing to be denied access to them, but I feel the endless droning about SATs offered nothing to feed that point and just made me try to compare the information to my own experience, with little, if any, success.
I apologize for my review being so unorganized. I am no professional writer myself.
Okay, but lacking..........2006-05-25
"Branded" definitely supplies a great deal of information, but Quart seems to fail in synthesizing this information for the reader. Granted, it is fairly easy to understand the points she is trying to make, but she fails to coherently state these points in a memorable fashion. The book is filled with endless examples and statistics, but it is lacking in overal argumentation. She seems to allow the facts and the stats to speak for themselves, without using them to prove specific points. The book is an endless supply of premises, with very few conclusions.
However, I did learn much from this book, and the chapter on teenage plastic surgery was quite shocking and disturbing to me.
Overall, I do recommend this book, if you are able to draw your own conclusions from the facts provided.
Brand This!.......2005-07-07
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart is a quick and fascinating read on the current and constructed intersections between young people, the media and popular culture, corporate agencies, and consumer culture.
What struck me most about Quart's analysis is how RELEVANT it is. Unlike many books published today, the research, reference, and anecdotal material in Branded (published in 2003) is very recent and does not rely too much, or at all really, on the 1990s.
Two shortcomings of the book were the chapter on Self-Branding (I felt Quart could have done more with body piercing, for example) and the last few pages (her final analysis could have been stronger). Despite these weak spots, Quart clearly did her research.
Branded is an interesting and even fun read suitable for parents, teenagers, and educators alike. As a teacher myself, I will definitely refer to it in the future.
Good concept, but not totally engaging.......2005-01-18
Alissa Quart tackles an admirable and potentially fascinating subject in Branded, yet I was left feeling a bit disappointed after finishing the book. I personally found her writing style a bit stilted, and it seems like there is a lot of information and many observations, yet not so much in-depth analysis. The book itself is not extremely long, so there is definitely room for more expansion. There are countless examples of teen branding in movies, fashion, magazines, advertisements, etc., and the author touches on all of these and more, but somehow the book felt more like a bombardment of information than a nuanced analysis. I had pretty high expectations when I read this book (especially from the many positive editorial reviews available), but it was ultimately not as satisfying an experience as I would have hoped.
Fresh and Disturbing Take on a Rather Tired Argument.......2004-09-23
I found it to be an excellent read, and I'm considering using some excerpts from it to spark writing and discussion in a basic writing class that I teach--a class where I'm always concerned that the readings I use are immediate, accessable and read well.
Although the book's subject is the way that companies market to teenagers, in a sense this is only a subset of the author's larger concern with capitalism and consumer culture. She obviously has a left wing take on this subject, although I disagree with earlier reviewers that her presentation is manipulative or unfair. The issue isn't whether or not companies fill a demand (obviously, they do), but about the lengths to which they go to create that demand. How you feel about this obviously depends on your politics, but Quart's viewpoint seems to me to be reasonable and valid.
My problem is that this argument is just sort of tired. I'm just bored of hearing the same critique of "consumer culture" over and over again. What sets this book apart, though is its focus on marketing to children, and, in particular, the passages where Quart presents the kids' lives through their own words. It's pretty disturbing to hear how closely they identify their own self-worth with the products that they use. I'm not just talking about the idea that they have to conform to a certain image in order to be beautiful--again, this is old news. But about how the almost BECOME the brand that they use. When a teenager named Carrie, a fan of MTV's "Total Request Live" describes her loyalty to that show and to the marketing she does for The Backstreet Boys by saying, "I like the Boys as much as my friends and family"--well, there's something really disturbing about that.
Book Description
Internationally Acclaimed Branding Guru Challenges Corporations: "It's Time to Act as Good Citizens"
What have today's brands in common with politicians? - They need to take an active, positive role in people's lives in order to be elected —locally and globally, says Marc Gobé, the founder of the widely successful Emotional Branding concept. Today's all-powerful, post-hedonistic consumers expect a deepening level of emotional commitment and social responsibility from the brands that they choose. In CITIZEN BRAND, an evolvement of his revolutionary EMOTIONAL BRANDING concept, the internationally acclaimed branding guru tells corporations how to become the socially relevant, caring community members that are elected in today's consumer democracy.
Three quarters of consumers would vote for corporate community involvement and ethical business practices, say recent polls. Yet while "cause marketing" programs abound, few corporations truly understand the emotional power of the "Citizen Brand" approach, argues Marc Gobé. Using brands like Starbucks and The Bodyshop and Home Depot as examples, CITIZEN BRAND reveals how companies can create strong and deep partnerships with people in America and across the globe by enriching their lives in creative and truly relevant ways.
The bursting dot.com bubble, anti-globalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, an economic slowdown, and the September 11 tragedy. . .the events of the past three years have changed dramatically what consumers expect from today's brands: they seek emotional support and orientation an increasingly complex, strenuous reality. Getting this right requires an intimate understanding of one's customers and their deepest values, says Marc Gobé. CITIZEN BRAND reveals how smart companies have responded to this reality check by treating their customers--and employees—with a new humanistic, emotional sensitivity. Nucor has made it a point to not lay off any of its people in the face of recession; other companies have followed the example of The Bodyshop by establishing community programs for customers and employees; Coca-Cola is using its trucks in Africa to bring medication and education to local customers.
As Gobé underlines, CITIZEN BRAND is not a comprehensive form of philantrophy or a new business strategy, but an inevitable consequence of global change: ". . .in a global world influenced more and more by local politics, religious upheaval, and social awareness, the role of businesses will change in a dramatic way. The need to reassess one's corporate responsibility is critical in a changed world."
Customer Reviews:
"Interesting" but not "good"........2004-05-20
I found this book less brilliant than his previous title ¡§Emotional branding¡¨. Gobe is simply repeating himself in a loosely knit 10-chapters format. There are many interesting case studies, but the author does not focus them tight enough to make those examples relevant to the chapter title. For instance in chapter 2 he talks about trust and cause marketing, but he cannot solidly tie the two together; as trust does not always equal well-carried cause marketing campaigns, what IS trust in terms of branding? What are the mechanisms of ¡§trust¡¨? I think he should give us a global definition before diving into the subject.
There are numerous examples of such poorly related text in the book, I would advise you to read his first book ¡§Emotional branding¡¨ and skip this one.
Shifting into the future, the right way!.......2003-05-04
A book, a philosophy, a plan for the future - and one after my own heart...
In an age where many business fear for the future, claiming that customers are jaded, and even anti-business, Gobé presents the situation in more than a constructive manner, he gives a hopeful one.
Rather than throwing his hands up to the sky, pointing to groups that plan 'Don't Buy Anything' days as the end of it all, he shows us that commerce is not over, it is evolving.
More than heart-warming, I think he is right. (He sure has described me as a consumer!) And I know I want to run my business by these ethics, goals & philosophies.
However, his message is more than an uplifting moment, or one of personal identification for me - he gives concrete examples of how businesses can connect with today's customers.
If you can invest in only one branding book this year, this is the one to get.
A definite winner!.......2002-11-05
A fantastic and very useful book--a must read for any marketing professional today. This book is about far more than how to build effective "cause marketing" campaigns. It is nothing short of a revolutionary/revelatory new approach to business in our difficult era!
Gobe is a branding visionary with a very insightful and inspiring approach to building strong brands. While I enjoyed and appreciated his last book, Emotional Branding, I am even more impressed with this one. He proposes here a whole new shift in thinking that is of course-- in a post-Enron, et al.. world-- very a propos today.
He argues that a holistic, consumer-centric and ethics grounded approach to both business and marketing strategies is not only "good" but also good business--it's the new expectation (and biggest opportunity as many will fail to recognize the changed landscape...). This is something I have believed strongly and observed in action for many years as a marketing executive for a global corporation with major consumer brands and it's rewarding to see these ideas put forth in such a fresh and engaging manner.
But besides giving us a provocative new way of looking at marketing strategies from a big picture perspective, the book also has a lot of value from a very practical, hands on point of view. It is full of useful information, such as highly original insight into the latest consumer trends and demographics research, lots of well thought out and unsually interesting case studes and examples of what the most innovative branding professionals are doing. Most of all, the book gives marketers a practical detailed process for how a brand can become a "Citizen Brand" for consumers today and continues the theme of his last book giving insight on how marketers can touch consumers on an emotional level that will inspire that rarity of all rarities--brand loyalty!
Book Description
This is the definitive step-by-step guide to creating cutting edge television commercials, exploring everything from how television communicates, how planners contribute new insights, how to get great television ideas, how commercials are structured, how to sell concepts and how they should be executed.
Join a master class where the faculty includes Tim Delaney, Graham Fink, Neil French, Lee Garfinkel, Roy Grace, John Hegarty, Steve Henry, Drain Holmes, Lionel Hunt, Michael Patti, Jim Riswold and 70 other creative leaders. Share their personal creative processes in page after page of practical and inspiring guidance, complete with storyboards and case histories.
Step behind the famous campaigns at BBDO New York, Fallon, Goodby Silverstein, Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury, Leagas Delaney, Lowe, Saatchi & Saatchi, Wieden & Kennedy and great agencies in the US, UK and Australia. Consult film directors at Hungry Man, @ radical.media, Window, and many more. Explore creativity in the emerging markets of Asia, especially China and India. And possess the statistical evidence that creativity SELLS!
Customer Reviews:
Break out of the mold.......2004-05-14
Aitchison talks about the different myths in advertising and how some isn't true. Then he gives us some clues about how to get an idea and execute it successfully.
It is a great book that gathers opinions of advertisers worldwide. This is for someone in the advertising field who wants something different and original without going overboard.
The Best Ad Book on Commercials!.......2002-08-15
Bravo! Cutting Edge Commercials is the second book in the Cutting Edge series. This book contains the WORLD's BEST television commercials. Get your dose of inspiration here! Can't wait for the next volume to be published ...
Average customer rating:
- Recommended Read
- The Show and The Business
- This book is a joke!
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There's No Business That's Not Show Business: Marketing in an Experience Culture
Bernd Schmitt ,
David L. Rogers , and
Karen Vrotsos
Manufacturer: FT Press
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ASIN: 0130471194 |
Customer Reviews:
Recommended Read.......2004-01-29
I thought "Show Biz" was thoroughly entertaining--and highly pertinent given today's media circus around everything from the California gubernatorial election to today's leading companies. I read Bernd Schmitt's previous books in my MBA marketing classes and find still his approach useful in aligning my marketing team around the customer experience. This book clearly showed me how entertainment is becoming part of the marketing mix, and energized me to use show business to increase my reach and relevancy with customers. I highly recommend it.
The Show and The Business.......2004-01-29
This book is clever and entertaining. It's anecdotal and moves quickly, but packs a lot of punch. It covers a broad span of businesses and illustrates just how this new type of "Show" business is fundamentally changing marketing all over the world. The authors make a strong case for this type of marketing with their commentary on today's consumer/business culture. I think this book would be edifying for industry insiders and anyone at all interested in today's marketing world.
The book itself has a "show biz" appeal to it, but it backs up the "show" by getting down to business. I recommend There's No Business That's Not Show Business for anyone concerned with cutting edge marketing or branding issues today.
This book is a joke!.......2003-11-25
I have read all books from this author. What can I say? His first and second were good. I don't know what happened, but the quality of his books have been falling since then. The book is full of examples of what can you do to bring a little "show" into your "business", too bad it's written for those few people who get to manage a huge brand, or have something of an unlimited budget to play with! Of course I'd like to have live shows for my customers! Of course launching a watch at a fancy New York dance club sounds cool! Of course I'd love a theme park or a museum of my own! After reading some pages you start wondering if Schmitt is writing for someone to read this book or he's just trying to sell his consulting business. After reading pearls like:"if you're starting a $150 million promotional campaign...", I just had to close this book and look for something more interesting to do. (There's a long time I leave a book unfinished, but this one is entitled to this honor). Get real...
Book Description
Marketing in the early 21st century is dominated by two approaches, neither of which is visible to the naked eye: the use of data to define and shape human affairs into machine-readable form and the effort to create and sustain ongoing two-way relationships with customers. The former is one way human life is being subjugated to the regime of the machine; the latter is one way the individual may one day emerge from within the datascape. A post-modern perspective is used to reveal both the "kaleidoroscope" of data and the "raw immaterials" of relationships in two companion essays.
Customer Reviews:
Rebecca Nailed It.......2007-03-18
Rebecca's review is spot-on. I could read this book several times and get something new out of it each time. Ellis succinctly captures the changes in consumer-marketer interaction and the new 21st century value exchange and does a great job of putting it in historical and philosophical context.
Big Thoughts on Marketing .......2007-03-09
Most books on business (particularly those by self-proclaimed "gurus") seize on a single idea. With terrier-like tenacity they explain it, illustrate it, present case studies of it, then explain it yet again, until a readers feels she's entered some sort of textual version of "Groundhog's Day."
"Marketing in the In-Between," takes the opposite approach. It packs so many clusters of thought, ideas, revelations and connections on every page, the reader will need to repeatedly dip in to glean all the thoughts. It challenges readers to truly ponder and to question the basic precepts and practices upon which marketing is based.
Book Description
A follow-up to Grant McCracken's groundbreaking Culture and Consumption, this new book trades the usual platitudes about the consumer society for a more detailed, exacting anthropological treatment. Each section of the book pairs a brief essay with an academic article. The essay is designed for a quick, provocative glimpse of the topic; the article provides a deeper anthropological treatment. The book opens with a broadside against the now thoroughly conventionalized attack on the consumer culture. Essays follow on homes, cars, people, and social mobility; celebrities, consumerism, and self-invention; museums and the power of objects; the anthropology of advertising; and marketing, meaning management, and value. Like McCracken's previous volume, this new book is an engaging, informative, and eye-opening foray into modern consumer culture.
Book Description
Ever wondered what the Ms in M&Ms stand for?
If Scotch tape was invented in Scotland?
Why a cereal that contains neither grapes nor nuts is called Grape Nuts?
Who thought Gap was a good name for a clothing store?
From the Adidas we wear to the Volkswagens we drive, the daily lives of Americans are dominated by the manufacturers' trademarks that adorn nearly everything we own. Food, clothes, cars, household furnishings, even cell phones are all chosen by brand name. Yet many of these trademarks and product names pose mysteries.
But not when Evan Morris, creator of the award-winning The Word Detective website, is on the case! In From Altoids to Zima he reveals the fascinating, often wacky stories behind 125 brand names. Organized by product categories -- food and drink; clothing; technology, toys, and assorted bright ideas; cars; and drugs and cosmetics -- the story of each product is told with Morris's trademark wit and humor, complete with sidebars that highlight brand names that have become "genericized" (aspirin); a "What Were They Thinking?" honor roll of strange and often disastrous product names (Edsel); what happens when good brand names go bad (Kool-Aid after the Jonestown mass suicide); and debunked urban legends (the combination of Pop Rocks and soda that was rumored to be lethal).
Download Description
"Ever wondered what the Ms in M&Ms stand for? If Scotch tape was invented in Scotland? Why a cereal that contains neither grapes nor nuts is called Grape Nuts? Who thought Gap was a good name for a clothing store? From the Adidas we wear to the Volkswagens we drive, the daily lives of Americans are dominated by the manufacturers' trademarks that adorn nearly everything we own. Food, clothes, cars, household furnishings, even cell phones are all chosen by brand name. Yet many of these trademarks and product names pose mysteries. But not when Evan Morris, creator of the award-winning The Word Detective website, is on the case! In From Altoids to Zima he reveals the fascinating, often wacky stories behind 125 brand names. Organized by product categories -- food and drink; clothing; technology, toys, and assorted bright ideas; cars; and drugs and cosmetics -- the story of each product is told with Morris's trademark wit and humor, complete with sidebars that highlight brand names that have become ""genericized"" (aspirin); a ""What Were They Thinking?"" honor roll of strange and often disastrous product names (Edsel); what happens when good brand names go bad (Kool-Aid after the Jonestown mass suicide); and debunked urban legends (the combination of Pop Rocks and soda that was rumored to be lethal). "
Customer Reviews:
From Altoids to Zima: The Surprising Stories Behind 125 Famous Brand Names.......2005-08-13
Great trivia book. My family has taken this book to work and treated co-workers to interesting tidbits of information that surprised people who have used different brands in the book and didn't know how the products were named or invented. Great fun.
Book Description
What did Johnny Depp do with his “Winona Forever” tattoo after she dumped him? What is the ritual surrounding the Dixie Chicks and the little birdies on their feet? How many times does Angelina Jolie have “Billy Bob” tattooed on her body and where? Celebrity Skin has the answers and much more in this ultimate photo collection of the tattoos and body art of celebrities—from Drew Barrymore, and Sean Connery to Dennis Rodman, the Backstreet Boys, and Eminem. With over 100 pages of full-color photographs, Celebrity Skin gets the inside story (and inside look) at the beauty marks of the beautiful people.
Customer Reviews:
Good Collector's Item.......2006-06-07
I bought this because I'm a huge fan of Angelina Jolie, and even though it's a little basic, I enjoyed it and it makes a great addition to any collection or a great coffee table book.
Nice Photos.......2005-11-05
"Celebrity Skin" is basically a coffee table book full of photos of stars and their tattoos. It covers not just actors, but also sports icons, models and musicians. My two favorites being Bjork and Johnny Depp.
The photos are really nice and ones that I haven't seen elsewhere. The info was interesting, but I guess I was hoping for more insight on to what the tattoos symbolilze to the people who got them.
While I didn't dislike this book as much as some of the other reviewers, I should say that this was given to me as a gift and it's probably not a book I'd have purchased (definitely one to look at in the bookstore). I'm giving it four stars because it was fun to look through and the photos really are nice.
TRUELY DISAPPOINTING.......2004-01-31
What probably started off as a good idea over drinks late one night, this book looks like it was hurrily stitched together the next day like Frankenstein's monster. It seems like the author clipped up all his old People magazines and, along with every file photo he could lay his hands on, slapped together 2 pages for every celebrity/group he had. That's when the trouble starts. The pictures, more often then not, don't highlight the tattoos (or other body art) because they weren't shot for that purpose. They were just rounded up for Gerard to hang some lame (often smarmy) information around. This info is broken down into 4 categories : The Inside Scoop (a quickie bio), Raw Data (real names, birth [and sometimes death] dates, accomplishments, etc.), Skin Deep (obviously incomplete info about the celeb's body art that doesn't even list what is clearly showing in the accompanying photos), and Strange But True (Ripley's Believe It Or Not need not worry). The most glaring error of the book occurs when Gerard describes the tattoos that adorned each of the shoulders of the late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes of TLC. If you were to look at the pictures showing these 2 tattoos, you would immediately notice that both are shown to reside on the same left shoulder (the number 80/falcon tat on page 144 was indeed on her left shoulder while the Parron tat was on her right thus page 145 photo is actually backwards). While I didn't expect to see every marking on each celeb's body (at least not here), I bought this book expecting to see a little more. The back cover advertises "Up close (strike 1) and lavish (strike 2), here is the ultimate collection (strike 3 - yer out) of beauty marks for beautiful people". I'm glad I didn't pay full cover price for this turkey. Truely disappointing.
totally dissapointed.......2003-09-14
1st you can't see any of the tattoos, the photos are blurry and the descriptions of the tattoos are either incomplete, wrong or just not there. It was more like a copy of The National Inquirer on what the stars like to eat for breakfast. It had nothing to do with tattoos or what they mean. I was really dissapointed and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
Starstruck.......2002-09-20
I have read the other reviews online, which is what prompted me to write. Although I agree with some of their points, this title is a beautiful addition for anyone interested in the stars. Never before has there been a collection of adornments of the stars, and I found the text rather intriguing. I feel this book is accessible to everyone, not just tatoo freaks, and the design and layout are great.
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Books Index
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